The Colossatron is a mysterious, robotic dragon-thing that drops out of space specifically to destroy cities. Nobody knows what it is or where it came from; all we know is that it must be destroyed before it destroys us.

Nobody even knows how to control it, and that includes anyone playing the game.

Colossatron: Massive World Threat is the latest from Jetpack Joyride developer Halfbrick, and it’s the studio’s most esoteric title yet. And this is the team that also made a game about chopping fruit while avoiding bombs that, while possessing fuses, apparently only explode if they get cut.

So, yeah. It’s even weirder than that.

http://youtu.be/JoNqnn_goFE

The game contains no tutorial; Colossatron just kinda shows up and starts doing its destructive thing. And the first thing you realize is that your job is not really to control the mysterious metal beast. It pretty much just goes wherever it wants and fires its weapons according to its own schedule and internal logic.

Instead, your job is to arm and lengthen Colossatron while it slithers around blowing things up. You do this by dragging over the floating body segments that come from … somewhere. Don’t even worry about it. The point is that you add these pieces to the robosnake’s body, and each colored segment represents a different weapon.

It’s Halfbrick’s most esoteric title yet.

The game also has a light puzzle element to it, because if you put a blue and a yellow piece next to each other, they’ll come together to make a green segment with completely different abilities. You can also combine multiple segments of the same color into a more powerful version. Or, rather, the game does; again, this isn’t really up to you.

And that’s really the strangest thing about Colossatron: the amount of control it takes away from the players. Later, you can unlock abilities that let you tell Colossatron where to attack, but it’s mostly just going to slither around independently of any suggestions you might have about the best way to approach destroying these cities. It’s a little off-putting, really, and I often didn’t feel like I was playing a game so much as building a toy that is actively uninterested in whether or not I was there.

Game Name: : Colossatron: Massive World ThreatThe Good: Nice presentation, and space monsters destroying cities is basically a fun time all around.The Bad: Lack of player control, no real sense of influencing the events.The Verdict It’s a really weird game, and I’m not sure if I enjoy it or not. But it looks great, and the puzzle element is surprising.Buy from:App Store

About the author

Evan Killham lives in Nebraska and isn't interested in football, so he has plenty of time to play and think about video games. He has written for Bitmob and GamesBeat and sometimes, he even goes outside. But not too often because he's heard there are bees out there.

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